Darwin: Resource Management for Application-Aware Networks

Sophisticated multi-party applications will use many traffic streams with
very different characteristics and will be network-aware so they can perform
well on a variety of networks. At the same time, we see the emergence of an
electronic service industry that is eager to deliver a wide variety of
services to end-users. Services will range from low-level "bearer" services
that transport bit streams over the network infrastructure to value-added
services such as video conferencing, computing services, and data mining.
Complex applications will support cooperation among multiple parties by
combining video conferencing with access to large amounts of archived data,
real time data streams, and distributed computing tasks. Supporting this
service model and this emerging class of complex services requires
innovation in a number of areas, including support for application-specific
handling of traffic, sharing of resources between cooperating traffic
streams, adapting quickly to changes in the network conditions and
application requirements, systematic methods for balancing the constraints
and priorities of services competing for network resources, and reliability
and security. The CMU application-aware networking project will develop a
comprehensive suite of resource management mechanisms in support of such
"application-aware" networks. The project is headed by Peter Steenkiste,
Allan Fisher, and Hui Zhang.